Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [18]
The truth is, I didn’t want to drink Poland Spring because I didn’t want to like it. I was almost certain it would taste better than Yarmouth water, which contains chlorine and comes through pipes never visited by a disinfecting pig. But so what? Foie gras tastes better than chopped liver. That doesn’t mean I’m going to buy it. I don’t need to spoil myself. I don’t want to get used to expensive things, especially things that might, if the nuns and greenies are right, disrupt the social and environmental order.
I might have been overintellectualizing this, but I worried that drinking bottled water would only contribute to an insidious trend. It was becoming normal to pay high prices for things that used to cost little, or nothing. Such as television reception (now we have expensive cable). Or basic telephone service (now we have cell phones). The shifting baseline means that instead of collectively fighting problems—such as bad service or bad quality—we accept them and move on: to the private sector. The city of Baltimore, after fifteen years of trying to remove lead from public schools’ water fountains, in 2007 gave up and switched to coolers of bottled water.
The environmental writer Bill McKibben calls this movement away from a sense of common purpose and toward personal enhancement “hyperindividualism.” It puts earbuds in our ears and divorces us from communal experience; it builds bigger houses and bigger cars, while it clogs the roads and warms the climate. Hyperindividualism is relatively new, McKibben writes, “but very powerful.” And while having more personal stuff signals strong economic growth, it ain’t making us happy, according to some economists and sociologists. In fact, it’s increasing social alienation. Hyperindividualism lets those who can afford to opt out—whether from public schools, mass transit, or tap water—to further isolate themselves, in style. A 1985 article in the Financial Times declared that buying bottled water “represents the exercise of private choice in preference to public provision, which can seriously be seen as a good in itself.” Why? Because public provision can be inefficient, inadequate, or unhealthy.
I talked to Brennan and Maples for several hours with the Poland Spring bottle in front of me. The men sipped from their containers and I from my Nalgene. Finally, like a dieter sitting in front of a popcorn bowl, I’d had enough: I just had to sample their water. I cracked the top—pop! I liked that sound; everyone did—and took a careful sip. And you know, it really did taste good—round and smooth. But, as I said, it wasn’t something I wanted to get used to. I closed the top and set the bottle aside.
Mascha and I have tried six waters by now, though he has little to say about any of them. Me either, except for the Gerolsteiner, which has big bubbles and a salty, chalky taste that I like. The king daddy of mineral water, which by law contains at least 250 parts per million of naturally occurring total dissolved solids, Gerolsteiner clocks in with a TDS of 2,527. It has the usual calcium and magnesium, plus chloride, fluoride, bicarbonate, manganese, nitrate, potassium, silica, sodium, strontium, and sulfates.
The spring and artesian waters (which are pumped from an aquifer but not from a spring) I selected don’t make much of an impression on me. Are they pure, crisp, refreshing—the words most commonly used to describe water (and beer)? Sure. But what does pure mean? “I never use that word,” Mascha says. “There’s always something in there.” He pours a sample of